Free Vigil for a Stranger by Kitty Burns Florey

loved it. I hadn’t yet sent Charlie the address. According to the note on the back of his card (a roguish Santa unloading his pack), he was still in L.A., still working for the agency, and he was involved with a woman who, he said, just might work out. At the end of his note, he wrote: “It was twenty years last summer that Pierce died. Isn’t that incredible? I still can’t accept it that he’s dead. I wish I could see you. Maybe next time I’m in N.Y.”
    The last part I didn’t pay much attention to: he said pretty much the same thing every time he wrote, and yet we never got around to meeting. But I read over and over the sentence, “I still can’t accept it that he’s dead.” Accept it. What did he mean by that? Did it mean he literally didn’t believe it? That he suspected Pierce of being alive? That he had some evidence? Had he—my heart caught when I thought of this—had he, perhaps, caught a glimpse of Pierce somewhere? Had he had a vision similar to mine?
    I had decided to tell James nothing of my New York experience. What was there to tell? And even if there were more substance, James was so—I have trouble coming up with the proper adjective—he was so normal (but that sounds dull), he was so cheerful (but that makes him seem mindless), he was so perfect the way he was that I hesitated to introduce trouble into his life. Not that he hadn’t had plenty of troubles. He’d had a more than usually difficult childhood (orphaned young, no siblings, raised by unsympathetic aunts), his marriage had been turbulent, the discovery that he couldn’t father children had devastated him, and after his divorce he’d had some rough relationships before he met me. But he was like someone out of Dickens—Oliver Twist, perhaps, who maintained his sweet nature and optimistic spirit no matter what horrors he endured—or like Proust himself, in his cork-lined room, working furiously against the deadline of death but never losing his serenity of soul. I thought of James as a saint, a St. Francis, a savior not only of cats and of kids like Raymond but of myself. He was a being of contagious contentment, and I needed that quality in him more than I needed to confide what happened in New York.
    Charlie had enclosed one of his business cards. He was with the Harlan Vickery Agency, and their card—much less elegant and classy than Alison Kaye’s—was dominated by a big red-and-blue HV monogram/logo that looked like it had been designed in 1953. I wondered if it was consciously kitschy or if it simply hadn’t been changed in all those years. Down in the left corner was Charles Molloy in blue and in the right corner a Los Angeles phone number in red.
    I studied the card, and the Christmas card with the smirking Santa, and I pondered Charlie’s choice of words ( I still can’t accept it that he’s dead ), and I couldn’t keep from wanting to phone him. I needed to talk about it with someone—not James, not anyone who hadn’t known Pierce, there was no one but Charlie I could tell it to. It wouldn’t let me go. I tried , I justified myself to an imaginary accuser—a Satanic presence (not unlike Emile) who said I was pandering to my own mental instability, encouraging it. But it was true that I had tried. I had been stern with myself, had banished it all from my mind and hidden it away in a closet, only to find it emerging in my painting, in visions of the Satanic accuser, and in my violent, unremembered dreams. Being at my parents’ house didn’t help, of course—the grove of trees, the reminders of Robbie and of the time that Pierce and I spent there before we all drove up to Plover Island that summer.
    I wasn’t sleeping well. The elusive, nightmarish dreams I was having made me wake up before dawn. But one night I slept straight through and had a very clear and insistent dream in which I was